I think there is a commonality with the UK Police that might not be there in France and Spain that have a different MO with investigations and have an invetigating judge.

Michael Mansfield QC, a barrister wrote about this ages ago with the Birmingham 6, a famous miscarriage of justice that amounted to a beaten confession and prison time for innocent people. In the book he describes the problem that the police see themselves as the only frontline for law-and-order. They are under immense pressure for results from various political forces so they are given leaway to "break a few rules" and get the job done, after all, "We know he did it!"

In France, my limited understanding, is that the police do not generally investigate but the investigation comes under a judge. They will use the police to gather evidence and interview people but the pressure for a result is on the judge and not the police. The judge should ensure that laws are followed because they are part of the judiciary. If the police are then told to use some tech or not, it has already been approved by a judge, otherwise they won't risk it themselves because why should they?

> In France, my limited understanding, is that the police do not generally investigate but the investigation comes under a judge. They will use the police to gather evidence and interview people but the pressure for a result is on the judge and not the police. The judge should ensure that laws are followed because they are part of the judiciary.

Police investigations in common law countries have judicial oversight, but it seems like a feature rather than a bug to separate judges from investigators. If the judge is in charge of the investigation, who's going to stop the judge from issuing unreasonable search warrants?

Yes, because we don't hold people accountable anymore. It didn't happen after Snowden revelation because it was politically inconvenient. That would be for media to put guilty parties under the spotlight. That has failed so bascically police could break any law they want, wired.com is certainly part of the problem here.

You have to put strong legal deterants against it. Personal responsibility. That is actually pretty easy to implement if legislators really wanted to.

I don't think police needs it, but crony authorities under executive control almost certainly do. Russians, Russians, Russians...

We don't hold people accountable? Do you really think the police are any better many decades earlier?

For sure, the criminal justice system had gotten worse, with over-incarceration and criminalization, but I doubt that the police are your friends in the 1950s since much of the structure of police organizations hadn't changed that much.

I didn't live in the 1950s but some things that certainly caused where we are today are qualified immunity and powerful unions that are excluded in GOP union busting efforts. States can opt to end qualified immunity for police in their jurisdiction, so it's up to citizens to put pressure on state governments to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity

Accountability is exactly what's needed. Police unions, a culture of closing ranks - all this has to go and a top-down change driven by politicians/ministers needs to happen. Chauvin had 18 complaints lodged against him, presumably at least one of those was valid, and so accountability in the form of termination would've avoided what happened. Every private organization would have fired someone with this many customer complaints but the public sector systemically lacks accountability and this leads to terrible outcomes.

>and a top-down change driven by politicians/ministers needs to happen.

I'm not sure if that is politically possible. The police unions start complaining when politicians start to do something (see when they turned their back on DeBlasio in front of news cameras). I'm not sure if it's fixable without repercussions on the offending officers or the union rather than the taxpayers. There is zero or near zero repercussions of the officers, the chain of command or the union for malfeasance. Of course they are going to act how they act, they're humans. The worst part is the bad officers often corrupt the good ones, or make them quit, so over time there's just the bad.

I never understood the responsibility with organizations such as the police...

I do something bad, I get punished and I pay the fine.

John Smith the policeman does something bad, taxpayers pay the fine.

Of course. When has it ever worked? The only hope citizens have against abuse is neutralizing law enforcement technology. Control it by making it not work anymore. They'll whine about it because it'll make their jobs harder but it doesn't matter.

Especially with a law.

The police generally consider laws to be for little people. In the US, any law that is supposed to apply to police has to not depend on the District Attorney ever filing charges, because they won't, except for certain high-visibility murders, and usually not even then.

Something that has worked sometimes is a state or federal law affecting city police. The law should have provisions to allow citizens to initiate enforcement, and, for egregious offenses, provisions to restrict the convicted officer from working in other police departments.

Too often, departments appear to respond to public pressure by firing the officer. But that actually achieves very little; the officer just goes to work for another city, with a fresh, clean record. There are a lot of cities.

It would be helpful to establish a national registry of police behavior, so that offenses at one department follow them to the next.

OTOH, the laws that work against cops are the ones that invalidate the things they do on their day jobs. If they violate the law and a suspect goes free, that has actual consequences for them, mentally at least.

Of course, they still have to get caught, but it won't be the DA that has to do something about it, it's the defendant's lawyer who will do it.

I agree, but this only helps if they're actually going after someone they charge with something. If they are merely violating your rights but don't charge you, this would have little to no impact on police wrongdoing.

Actual consequences? So, the cop cracks your skull, but the judge lets you go, and the cop continues cracking skulls, maybe yours again.

Your lawyer maybe sues the department for use of excessive force, and maybe gets a settlement from the taxpayers. Again, with exactly zero effect on the crooked cop.

Maybe lawyers should be suing the police union, too.

Some people have been pushing for persona liability with the police. I think we could assume in this better world we are dreaming of where citizens can arrest an officer they also have personally liability.

>Of course, they still have to get caught, but it won't be the DA that has to do something about it, it's the defendant's lawyer who will do it.

But unfortunately, this means that anybody who can't afford a good lawyer, will be an easy target for trampling on their rights

Allowing citizens to initiate enforcement sounds like a potentially good idea. Are you saying that citizens can prosecute police on behalf of the state? Where has it been tried before?

I might have some reservations with this, but proving that cops committed crimes is actually extremely commonplace. It happens in criminal courtrooms on a daily basis, as the primary vector to get evidence thrown out against a defendant. When cops commit crimes while gathering evidence, those criminal actions taint the evidence.

The problem is that nobody ever prosecutes the cops for the crime. The evidence gets thrown out, criminals walk free, and then nothing happens after that. It would be nice if the same defense attorney that proved the cop acted unlawfully could follow up by putting the cop in prison.

To be perfectly honest I see no reason why all the prosecutorial powers vested exclusively on the state should be exclusive to the state.

There should be nothing that the executive branch does in terms of investigation and prosecution, that the average citizen should be legally barred from doing.

This includes prosecuting crimes in criminal court, requesting and enforcing warrants, and so on.

The only difference between an average citizen and the government employees doing these things should be that the government employes are being paid to do these things as a full time job.

Some states (like Pennsylvania[1], for example) do have a process for "private criminal complaints". It's not without major drawbacks. The process can be (and has been) abused by people who simply want to make life difficult for others.

Texas also recently took the concept you've described but implemented the inverse with SB-8[2] which allows citizens to do precisely what the government itself is legally barred from doing.

[1]https://www.pacodeandbulletin.gov/Display/pacode?file=/secur...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Heartbeat_Act

That would result just in sovereign citizens doing an unlimited amount of paper terrorism.

As opposed to the state?

Simply add a cost to prosecutions that fail, with it going towards the winner.

> with it going towards the winner.

The cops will abuse the shit out of that. That gives them a monetary incentive to botch investigations when their buddies are involved.

Hence the:

>There should be nothing that the executive branch does in terms of investigation and prosecution, that the average citizen should be legally barred from doing.

>This includes prosecuting crimes in criminal court, requesting and enforcing warrants, and so on.

>The only difference between an average citizen and the government employees doing these things should be that the government employes are being paid to do these things as a full time job.

If the cops botch their investigations... Well there's nothing stopping anyone else from conducting their own. Might as well conduct one into the cops botching of the investigation too.

What makes you think someone prosecuting a police officer would rely on the police investigating the officer?

they already have an incentive to botch investigations when their buddies are involved. Maybe this makes the incentive slightly greater but you shouldn’t rely on cops to investigate their buddies anyway

> As opposed to the state?

Ok, so you consider the state to be equivalent to sovereign citizens?

Also, how about investigations that never go to a prosecution? It’s pretty simple to harass someone that way.

Yes?

I dont see why the state should be considered special. Ultimately it is supposed to work for the people, is it not? It's powers are delegated to it by the people.

I dont see "only the state should have the right to harass people" as a legitimate argument.

If it's simple to harass someone that way, then making it available to everyone will increase the need to fix a broken system where people can be arbitrarily harassed.

The sovereign citizens aren’t elected.

> If it's simple to harass someone that way, then making it available to everyone will increase the need to fix a broken system where people can be arbitrarily harassed.

Making a broken system worse does increase the need to fix it, but it doesn’t mean it gets fixed, it just means we have a worse need.

What does being elected or not have to do with it? Violent mobs also have democratic legitimacy, but somehow I doubt you'll think they should have a right to harass you.

And on the contrary, it is by making the situation unbearable for everyone that popular and political will to change a broken system is created.

The worst thing that can happen is for an injustice to be prolonged just because it only affects a select group of people that those in power dislike.

> Violent mobs also have democratic legitimacy,

No they don’t.

> And on the contrary, it is by making the situation unbearable for everyone that popular and political will to change a broken system is created.

When has that ever worked?

One of the problems is that there are different types of "illegal". The laws we're familiar with specify both that doing something is illegal, and also spell out a penalty for violation. But benerally the laws that set out government procedures don't specify any consequences for failing to follow the procedure.

So the best that can happen after years of court time (with the government agents being paid the whole time), is a court judgement to stop doing something. There is no personal liability for the offending agents, no liquidated damages for the victims, no conspiracy charges for management's illegal policies, etc.

In general, the state has a massive blindspot towards damages that it itself inflicts. As we can expect from any natural system, it has settled into creating ever more externalities. Cops have been abusing "you might beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride" for forever. Now that moral hazard is everywhere.

In a just society, much of the state's activities would be viewed as just another actor on a level playing field, and would therefore be directly liable the damages it itself causes to innocent parties.

I agree with you to some extent, but a lot of the corrupt behavior of police is actually illegal with explicit laws and sentencing. For example, "you might beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride". That is an arrest without probable cause, as if the officer thinks that the defendant can beat the rap, he doesn't have enough evidence to arrest. That is a chargeable offense known as Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law, and it carries a max penalty of 10 years in prison.

The biggest problem is our chickenshit prosecutors, not a lack of criminal laws that apply to the police. We could have more, certainly, but we don't even apply the ones we have.

I agree with what you're saying too, and the problem needs to be attacked from every angle it can be.

However, referencing a completely different law kind of makes my point. Straight "kidnapping" and "false imprisonment" would be the appropriate charges. Yet the corrupt cop is still allowed to hide behind their nominal position, despite deliberately acting outside its authority.

When I wrote my comment I was thinking of the TSA, which has done many things that were later slapped down by the court, but with no punishment for having violated the law for so long. Because despite being illegal, their actions were "policy" and thus apparently every crime they already committed is let slide.

If the problem were just corrupt prosecutors, then we would expect to still see plenty of civil suits - individuals can still sue on their own. Yet if you ask an attorney about doing so, they'll just laugh. And even when the situation is serious enough to warrant a civil suit, it's still the city getting sued rather than the person who happens to be employed as an officer. The equivalent in the tech world would be cracking as a hobby, and when caught passing the responsibility off to your employer because you were using your work-provided laptop. But obviously that doesn't fly in the private sector.

I just took a look, and "bad cop database" appears to be a new start up vector, littered with dubious websites.

When you need laws to protect you from laws (or law enforcement), maybe there's a problem somewhere deeper down. It comes back to a principle I roughed out and live by when thinking about rules: if it's out of the box hard to enforce, it likely isn't justifiable as a rule (I'm not speaking about the laws around controlling police surveillance, but rather the laws the police are trying to enforce that lead them to using invasive surveillance).

> It's not easy to control police – even with a law

FTFY.

So it seems like this is something anyone can do. As in, I can go and buy or make a license plate scanner all I want. I can publish the data if I choose to. I can sell it or put in online for free.

And of course a cop can do the same thing, they just cannot automate it. If the city wanted to spend a gazillion dollars they could theoretically hire an army of people to manually record plate numbers and it would be within the law.

It's information leak. The truth is we always took this sort of privacy for granted. The information was there forever--it was just too arduous to process. Nothing fundamental changed from 1980-2020, only the expense and practicality of it.

I don't know what the solution is. I just think we are realizing that we never had privacy to start with, we were just shielded because it was impractical to process the data.

I remember 1980s government policy reasons for refusing to collect individual personal information outside the scope of project mandate or the law were 1) it costs money to collect it, 2) it costs money to store it, 3) information cannot be secured indefinitely, 4) the cost to victims of disclosure would be high, and 5) the liability of #4 isn't worth it

Make the law binding that both parties report it to an government accountability office, otherwise there would be steep financial costs to either party. When one reports and the other doesn’t, then an investigation can occur.

If it hits the police budget, you can expect the Chief to report it

But it's impossible without a law.

I think major factor in use of all new tech by police is money which they pay for it. It's so lucrative that I would say, from the comfort of my armchair, that it basically boils down to greed and availability of this selling channel. This is the top reason (me thinks). Systemic thinking on possible impact of all of this... does not matter till money flows.

nowhere in this article or the HN comments does it talk about funding of surveillance tech. if you want to control surveillance, then control the financing of it with a publicly accountable/transparent external oversight board whose members have as no conflict of interest with the source, path, or destination of the money

Pshht...we are the law... laws don't apply to us...laws of for ye, not for we... ~The Police (not the band).

For everyone living in America, the title may as well be "Did you know that oranges are orange?"